The best tacos of the year represent a hybrid of authentic Mexican traditions and Americana.

Mi Tocaya Antojería is not a taqueria. I say this because if you go to Mi Tocaya (and if you’re in or near Chicago, you ought to) and order only tacos, you are not going to get a full sense of the breadth and depth of chef Diana Davila’s immense skills. On the same token, if you go to Mi Tocaya and don’t order at least one of the tacos, well, you’ll be missing out on one of the best things I ate in 2017.

Take, for instance, the Campechano taco. Inspired by ones Davila ate in Mexico City, this taco combines a trio of meats—housemade chorizo, carne asada, and cochnita pibil—onto a tortilla (delivered from local tortilleria El Milagro) and tops them simply with onions, cilantro, and salsa verde. It’s pure guttural pleasure—the type of thing you want to eat at the end of a long night or the beginning of a long day—that’s made from such thoughtfully prepared components that it never ventures into cartoonish, meat-for-meat's-sake territory.

The campechano, by definition, has to be good. But how do you explain the insane deliciousness that is the chicken taco? The “Chucho” (whose name pays homage to the restaurant El Chucho that Davila helped open in D.C.) might have been my favorite, a hybrid—like many things at Mi Tocaya—of authentic Mexican traditions and Americana: The base is beer-can chicken that slow-cooks for four to five hours on a smoker on the restaurant's patio, accented with a salsa made with roasted xoconostle, the tart-tasting female fruit of the cactus.

Finally, never in my life have I been so pumped about a vegetarian taco. Listed on the menu as Milpa, in reference to a type of farm that uses a particular crop rotation of primarily corn, squash, beans, and chiles, this taco layers sautéed squash, corn crema, and pickled-and-fried morita chiles onto an earthy smear of huitlacoche paste (a concentrate of corn smut, onions, black beans, and chiles). It is salvation for “vegetarian tacos” everywhere.

Mi Tocaya doesn’t have anyone painstakingly forming tortillas or shaving al pastor off a rotating spit. On the flipside, this is not some place with precious, tweezer-plated tacos. These are tacos that reflect a chef’s ability to coax intense flavors out of everything from corn smut to beer-can chicken, and to combine those flavors so deftly it seems effortless. ”The tacos are not crazy cartwheels,” Davila said over the phone. When you’re this talented, they don’t have to be.